London. 5 March 2022. 08:00

Three things happened yesterday that narrowed the options for how the Ukraine crisis ends.

• NATO decisively rejected Zelensky’s call for a No Fly Zone (NFZ). This was always going to happen: there is no political support, nor appetite in the Western military for risking a nuclear exchange over the principle of Ukranian neutrality.
• Belarus leader Lukashenko indicated that, contrary to earlier threats, his tinpot regime would not join the invasion.
• Putin, in a call to Germany’s chancellor Scholz, “reiterated demands that Ukraine recognize the sovereignty of areas controlled by Moscow-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine and acknowledge that Crimea, which Russia invaded and annexed in 2014” according to Interfax.

There are two signals here: NATO is ruling out escalation; Putin is offering a path to de-escalation.

It was reiterated by Putin’s spokesman Kartopolov overnight:

“Our position is clear and transparent, including during these negotiations. The essence is as follows: Ukraine will recognize Crimea as the Russian Federation, as well as DPR/LPR within their administrative borders. Ukraine will change its social and state system and become a neutral, demilitarized country. That’s it.”

Putin’s real goal

We should not ignore Putin’s crazed, ethnonationalist and nihilist rhetoric — threatening to occupy the whole of Ukraine, remove it from the roster of the UN, and retaliate with nukes if NATO interferes. They are real threats. But they are not his goal.

Putin’s geopolitical goal, for which this war is the opening gambit, is to disorganise the West: split NATO, split the EU, split the populations of Western democracies, repudiate all international treaty obligations, so that in place of a global order there is a three-player power game between Russia, China and the US (where every four years Putin gets to choose the US president).

Since war is the “continuation of politics with other means”, the invasion of Ukraine has to be seen as a means to this end, not simply the end of controlling some or part of Ukraine.

So far, Putin has failed to destroy Western unity. In fact he has strenghened it. The decisive moment came when, reportedly at 3am with his close advisers, Scholz came to the momentous decision to re-arm Germany and remove all obstacles to NATO and the EU aiding Ukraine. So far he has taken the German population with him, though there is reportedly a backlash within his party.

The operational picture

But we must be frank about the operational situation in Ukraine. Despite putting up heroic resistance, inflicting heavy losses, and even maintaining localised air superiority, Putin has the upper hand.

When I met senior military and defence officials in Kyiv, two days before the war started, they told me that with 127,000 troops Putin “has the ability to force us back, and into negotiations, but cannot occupy. Give him two months to mobilise double that number and occupation is possible”.

What they predicted has happened.

Russia’s armies have advanced, recklessly and more incompetently than expected. Some experts speculate that this is because the USA is engaged in a massive electronic and cyber warfare operation against them, but it could just be incompetence. Either way, that’s how you get generals shot by snipers.

But one glance at the map (see above) shows the Ukranian operational dilemma. So tight is Ukraine’s game in the information war that I have not seen a single graphic showing where its manoeuvre brigades actually are, and no smartphone footage of them in action. So what follows is written on the basis of briefings only.

Ukraine’s forces can hold Kyiv for a long time, but the price would be material destruction of the city. But its forces cannot hold forever in the south-east, while Russian forces eat up the Black Sea coastline.

At some point they will be encircled east of the Dnepr river, and their commanders will face the choice of withdrawing under air strikes or telling Zelensky to arrange a ceasefire.

In both situations of encirclement, the Russian forces are so meagre that breakouts (from Kyiv or east Ukraine) will be possible, but they will be costly.

The population, the irregulars and the defenders of cities will go on fighing — and even inflicting tactical counterstrikes like the reported recapture of Zaporizha nuclear power station. The regular army could retreat into the cities alongside them, but that would leave Russia freedom of action to manouver east of the Dnepr, and soon holding the entire Black Sea coast.

Stoltenberg’s decisive refusal of a No Fly Zone is the clearest signal that Western air power won’t be used to change this situation.

Zelensky’s choice

Geopolitically, Putin is offering Zelensky and the West a choice: recognise Crimea and the Donbas as Russian territory, and make Ukraine neutral— or I will use the conscript armies now mobilising to occupy the whole country, or partition it, and absorb what I occupy into a soft federation with Russia. It’s the same choice signalled by the verbose bullshit in Putin’s famous essay on Ukraine, last summer.

The only way to breakout from that binary would be for NATO to escalate militarily. But it has chosen not to. And the reasons are both self-interest and strategic realism.

Western leaders now realise that Putin intends to turn Europe into a sandbox for war and dictatorship.

With ethnic tensions rising in Latvia, between the Russian-speaking and Latvian population; with millions of Ukrainians seeking refuge in Poland (whose far right hate them), the West knows Putin will not stop at Ukraine.

The young, progressive activists I’ve spoken to, operating on the borders helping refugees and resisters inside Ukraine, are already operating as if Europe will be invaded. That what they do now will mark them down in the FSB’s long list of targets.

They have adopted a Signal+Protonmail only comms regime, using only Notion.so for shared docs and wiping their phones of all other data and messaging apps. They’re close enough to Putin’s edgeworld to realise what the stakes are, and so should we.

Having achieved the first moment of strategic unity for more than a decade, my hunch is that the Western leaders have begun planning for a long, grinding geostrategic battle against Putin which they — and we, the democratic populations of the West — can win. But they can’t win by escalating militarily in Ukraine.

If we are lucky — and there is no second Trump presidency, and the EU remains united — the West will now isolate, paralyse and disintegrate Russia as a state, while rearming itself for both conventional and nuclear deterrence.

Unpalatable as this is for those of us on the left, and multilateralist wing of politics, it’s the only thing that’s going to stop Putin rolling tanks to Riga, Warsaw and Helsinki sometime in the next decade.

Popular resistance

The unknown quantity is the Ukrainian people’s capacity and willingness to resist. They are fighting for the right to be European. Their long-term future is in Europe, their cultural orientation Westwards — while the Russian paraiah state faces a dim future as an economic client of China.

I expect they will resist so long as there is an effective government calling for them to do so, and the West is publicly supplying them with arms, money and backing. Putin’s gamble is that he can crush them, and crush the rising opposition in Russia, before the economy implodes.

An organised resistance could inflict massive losses on Russia once this starts, and regular Russian troops — let alone conscripts — will not endure this. But that doesn’t solve Ukraine’s problem now.

Putin’s problem is time. His tanks are stuck in the mud north of Kyiv. He has shut down Facebook, Twitter, the whole independent media, the global media and is nationalising stricken Russian corporations. He, his oligarchs, generals and media proxies have become global pariahs overnight.

But with the central bank deprived of half its foreign currency reserves, and educated Russians fleeing the country, no amount of repression can stop economic collapse.

If the economy implodes so fast that further mobilisation becomes impossible, and civil order breaks down in the Russian east, where Navalny’s movement has been strong, that becomes a factor in the outcome of the Battle of Ukraine. But even if it does, Putin currently holds enough of the country to bargain along the lines I suggest above.

The next steps

Britain’s government is signally failing to impose sanctions tough enough or fast enough. But that’s just a symptom of a wider malaise in the West.

They’re quiet now, the Swiss fund managers, the German Putin-fluffers, the Irish financial engineers, the Maltese and Cypriot mafiosi— all those who’ve abetted Putin — but their political lobbying power is strong.

If a ceasefire triggers negotiations over Ukraine’s future, they will begin lobbying for the West to leave Ukraine in the lurch. It’s vital we do not.

The strategic question facing the West is not “how much of Ukraine does Putin get to keep”. It is: are we prepared to destroy this monster, using the opportunity he has given us — or live with him until the carbon era is over.

For make no mistake, Russia’s system of oligarchic rentier capitalism is doomed once we wean ourselves off oil and gas. To the 20 year old paratrooper in Kyiv I wrote about last month, that’s the promise the West could make: you will live in a democratic, European-linked and carbon free Ukraine.

The question is, do the populations of the West, and its political class have the willpower to make this happen? I hope they do. Because Putin is beatable at the geostrategic level.

It is likely, now, that both Sweden and Finland will try to join NATO. That means extending the nuclear defensive umbrella to a resilient democracy with a big army (Finland) and a divided democracy with a massive defence industry (Sweden). Traditionally the left in both countries has been hostile — not to a NATO orientation but to “NATO-isation”, ie the removal of tactical freedom in geopolitics.

Whether they formally join or not, Finland and Sweden are now firmly in NATO’s orbit. Both have committed to aid the defence of Ukraine with arms, and backed the EU position strongly. Even the left in both countries voted for the European Parliament resolution. That leaves the West strengthened, not weakened.

Systemic conflict

With a frontline running from Murmansk to wherever Putin decides to divide Ukraine, “the West” is now in a permanent standoff with Russia.

This is, as I’ve written before, in part a clash between two capitalist elites: the mafiosi of Russia and the neoliberal technocrats of the EU/US. But that is not the primary character of the conflict.

This is a systemic conflict, over what kind of world you want to live in. Ukrainians, Georgians and soon Moldovans all find themselves unfortinate enough to be on its front line. So do Turks, trapped beneath the bumbling and duplicitous autocracy of Erdogan.

What’s vital now is that Western governments:

• Continue to recognise the Zelensky government, and not the puppet regime that Putin will soon install.
• Carry on supplying arms, aid, money and allowing volunteers with military training
• Tighten economic and financial sanctions in order to collapse the Russian economy and paralyse the state, locking Russia out of all possible multilateral organisations.
• Rapidly re-arm and solidify around a new NATO “strategic concept” for the defence of Europe — rejecting the “out of area” philosophy that led to Afghanistan and Libya — and mobilise to defeat and isolate the pro-Putin political movements and proxy parties
• Refuse to be provoked into offensive military action — even if a humanitarian catastrophe unfolds. Nobody can win World War Three. There is every chance that we can liberate the Russian people from this waxwork narcissist through economic and financial sanctions, and by supporting the Russian opposition as the regime collapses.

Under no circumstances can we let a ceasefire, or a peace agreement in Ukraine be the occasion for removing sanctions on Russia.

The real test of Western leadership — and it’s a test for the labour and progressive movements which (with a few exceptions) have stood tall in this crisis — is whether we’re prepared to engage actively in systemic conflict with Putin, or allow him to disintegrate our own democracies through hybrid warfare and gas strangulation.

That’s the conflict you’re in. It will unfold in several dramas. This is only the first. Salute the defenders of Kyiv, Mariupol and Odessa because it’s your freedom they are fighting for.